FOOTNOTES:

I have dwelt upon this point longer than would else have been right, because in effect here lies the sole practical obstacle to the realization of a very beautiful framework of chronology, and because I consider myself as now speakingonce for all. Let us now move forward. I now go on to the other head of the eagle—the head which looks westward.

Here it will be objected that the Foundation of Rome is usually laid down in the year 753b.c.; and therefore that it differs from the foundation of the Olympiads by as much as 23 or 24 years; and can I have the conscience to ask my fair friends that they shouldput the clock backso far as that? Why, really there is no knowing; perhaps if I were hard pressed by some chronological enemy, I might ask as great a favour even as that. But at present it is not requisite; neither do I mean to play any jugglers' tricks, as perhaps lawfully I might, with the different computations of Varro, of the Capitoline Marbles, etc. All that need be said in this place is simply—that Rome is not Romulus. And let Rome have been founded when she pleases, and let her secret name have been what it might—though really, in default of a better, Rome itself is as decent and'sponsiblea name as a man would wish—still I presume that Romulus must have been a little older than Rome, the builder a little anterior to what he built. Varro and the Capitoline Tables and Mr. Hook will all agree to that postulate. And whatever some of them may say as to the youth of Romulus, when he first began to wield the trowel, at least, I suppose, he was come to years of discretion; and, if we say twenty-three or twenty-four, which I am as much entitled to say as they to deny it, then we are all right. 'All right behind,' as the mail guards say, 'drive on.' And soI feel entitled to lay my hand upon my heart and assure my fair pupils that Romulus himself and the Olympiads did absolutely start together; and for anything known to the contrary, perhaps in the same identical moment or bisection of a moment. Possibly his first little wolfish howl (for it would be monstrous to think that he or even Remus condescended to avagitusor cry such as a young tailor or rat-catcher might emit) may have symphonized with the ear-shattering trumpet that proclaimed the inauguration of the first Olympic contest, or which blew to the four winds the appellation of the first Olympic victor.

That point, therefore, is settled, and so far, at least, 'all's right behind.' And it is a great relief to my mind that so much is accomplished. Two great arrow-headed nails at least are driven 'home' to the great dome of Chronology from which my whole golden chain of historical dependencies is to swing. And even that will suffice. Careful navigators, indeed, like to ride by three anchors; but I am content with what I have achieved, even if my next attempt should be less satisfactory.

It is certainly a very striking fact to the imagination that great revolutions seldom come as solitary cases. It never rains but it pours. At times thereissome dark sympathy, which runs underground, connecting remote events like a ground-swell in the ocean, or like the long careering[35]of an earthquake before it makes its explosion.Abyssus abyssum invocat—'One deep calleth to another.' And in some incomprehensible way, powers not having the slightestapparentinterconnexion, no links through which anycasualinfluence could rationally be transmitted, do, nevertheless, in fact, betray either a blind nexus—an undiscoverable web of dependency upon each other, or else a dependency upon some common cause equally undiscoverable. What possible, what remote connexion could the dissolution of the Assyrian empire have with the Olympiads or with the building of Rome? Certainly none at all that we can see; and yet these great events so nearly synchronize that even the latest of them seems but a more distant undulation of the same vast swell in the ocean, running along from west to east, from the Tiber to the Tigris. Some great ferment of revolution was then abroad. The overthrew of Nineveh as the capital of the Assyrian empire, the ruin of the dynasty ending in Sardanapalus, and the subsequent dismemberment of the Assyrian empire, took place, according to most chronologers, 747 yearsb.c., just 30 years, therefore, after the two great events which I have assigned to 777. These two events are in the strictest and most capital sense the inaugural events of history, the very pillars of Hercules which indicate ane plus ultrain that direction; namely, that all beyond is no longer history but romance. I am exceedingly anxious to bring this Assyrian revolution also to the same great frontier line of columns. In a gross general way it might certainly be argued that in such a great period, thirty years, or onegeneration, can be viewed as nothing more than a trifling quantity. But it must also be considered that the exact time, and even the exact personality,[36]of Sardanapalus in all his relations are not known. All are vast phantoms in the Assyrian empire; I do not say fictions, but undefined, unmeasured, immeasurable realities; far gone down into the mighty gulf of shadows, and for us irrecoverable. All that is known about the Assyrian empire is its termination under Sardanapalus. It was then coming within Grecian twilight; and it will be best to say that, generally speaking, Sardanapalus coincided with Romulus and the Greek Olympiad. To affect any nearer accuracy than this would be the grossest reliance on the mere jingle of syllables. History would be made to rest on something less than a pun; for such asPalusandPul, which is all that learned archbishops can plead as their vouchers in the matter of Assyria, there is not so much as the argument of a child or the wit of a punster.

Upon the whole, the teacher will make the following remarks to her pupils, after having read what precedes; remarks partly upon the new mode of delivering chronology, and partly upon the things delivered:

I. She will notice it—as some improvement—that thethree great leading events, which compose the opening of history not fabulous, are here, for the first time, placed under the eye in their true relations of time, viz., as about contemporary. For without again touching on the question—do they, or do they not, vary from each other in point of time by twenty-three and by thirty years—it will be admitted by everybody that, at any rate, the three events stand equally upon the frontier line of authentic history. A frontier or debateable land is always of some breadth. They form its inauguration. And they would do so even if divided by a much wider interval. Now, it is very possible to know of A, B, and C, separately, that each happened in such a year, say 1800; and yet never to have noticed them consciouslyascontemporary. We read of many a man (L, M, N, suppose), that he was born in 1564, or that he died in 1616. And we may happen separately to know that these were the years in which Shakespeare was born and died. Yet, for all that, we may never happen consciously to notice with respect to any one of the men, L, M, N, that he was a contemporary of Shakespeare's. Now, this was the case with regard to the three great events, Greek, Roman, and Assyrian. No chronologer failed to observe of each in its separate place that it occurred somewhere about 750 yearsb.c.But every chronologer had failed to notice this coincident time of eachascoincident. And, accordingly, all failed to converge these three events into one focus as the solemn and formal opening of history. It is good to have a beginning, a starting post, from which to date all possible historical events that are worthy to be regarded as such. But it is better still to find that by the rarest of accidents, by a good luck that could never have been looked for, the three separate starting posts—whichhistorical truth obliges us to assume for the three great fields of history, Roman, Grecian, and Asiatic[37]—all closely coincide in point of time; or, to use the Greek technical term, all closely synchronize.

II. With respect to Greece and the Olympiad in particular, she will inform her pupil that the Olympic games, celebrated near the town of Olympia, recurred every fifth year; that is to say, there was a clear interval of four years between each revolution of the games. Each Olympiad, therefore, containing four years, it is usual in citing the particular Olympiad in which an event happened, to cite also the year, should that be known, or, being known, should that be of importance. Thus Olymp. CX. 3 would mean that such a thing, say X, occurred in the third year of the 110th Olympiad; that is, four times 110 will be 440; and this, deducted from 777 (the era of the Olympiads), leaves 337 yearsb.c.as the era when X occurred. Only that, upon reviewing the case, we find that the 110th Olympiad was not absolutely completed, not by one year; which, subtracted from the 337, leaves 336b.c.as the true date. If her pupil should say, 'But were there no great events in Greece before the Olympiads?' the teacher will answer, 'Yes, a few, but not many of a rank sufficient to be called Grecian.' They are merely local events; events of Thessaly, suppose; events of Argos; but much too obscure, both as to the facts, as to the meaning of the facts, and as to the dates, to be worth any student's serious attention. There were, however, threeevents worthy to be calledGrecian; partly because they interested more States than one of Greece; and partly because they have since occupied the Athenian stage, and received a sort of consecration from the great masters of Grecian tragedy. These three events were the fatal story of the house of Œdipus; a story stretching through three generations; and in which the war against the Seven Gates of Thebes was but an episode. Secondly, the Argonautic expedition (voyage of the shipArgo, and of the sailors in that ship,i.e., the Argonauts), which is consecrated as the first voyage of any extent undertaken by Greeks. Both these events are as full of heroic marvels, and of supernatural marvels, as the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Fairy Morgana. Later than these absolute romances comes the semi-romance of the Iliad, or expedition against Troy. This, the most famous of all Pagan romances, we know by two separate criteria to be later in date than either of the two others; first, because the actors in the Iliad are the descendants of those who figured as actors in the others; secondly, from the subdued tone of the romantic[38]which prevailsthroughout the Iliad. Now, with respect to these three events in Grecian history, anterior to the Olympiads, which are all that a young student ought to notice, it is sufficient if generally she is made aware of the order in which they stand to each other, or, at least, that the Iliad comes last in the series, and if as to this last and greatest of the series, she fixes its era precisely to one thousand years before Christ. Chronologers, indeed, sometimes bring it down to something lower. But one millennium, the clear unembarrassed cyphers of 1,000, whether in counting guineas or years, is a far simpler and a far more rememberable era than any qualifications of this round number; which qualifications, let it not for a moment be forgotten, are not at all better warranted than the simpler expression. One only amongst all chronologers has anything to stand upon that is not as unsubstantial as a cloud; and this is Sir Isaac Newton. And the way in which he proceeded it may be well to explain, in order that the young pupil may see what sort of evidences we haveprior to the Olympiadsfor any chronological fact. Sir Isaac endeavoured by calculatingbackwards to ascertain the exact time of some celestial phenomenon—as, suppose, an eclipse of the sun, or such and such positions of the heavenly bodies with regard to each other. This phenomenon, whatever it were, call X. Then if (upon looking into the Argonautic Expedition or any other romance of those elder times) he finds X actually noticed as co-existing with any part of the adventures, in that case he has fixed by absolute observation, as it were, what we may call the latitude and longitude of that one historical event; and then using this, as we use our modern meridian of Greenwich, as a point of starting, he can deduce the distances of all subsequent events by tracing them through the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the several actors concerned. The great question which will then remain to be settled is, how many years to allow for a generation; and, secondly, in monarchies, how much to allow for a reign, since often two successive reigns will not be two successive generations, because whilst the two reigns are distinct quantities, the two lives are coincident through a great part of their duration. Now, of course, Sir Isaac is very often open to serious criticism, or to overpowering doubts. That is inevitable. But on the whole he treads upon something like a firm footing. Others, as regards that era, tread upon mere clouds, and their authority goes for nothing at all.

Such being the state of the case, let the pupil never trouble her memory for one moment with so idle an effort as that of minutely fixing or retaining dates that, after all, are more doubtful, and for us irrecoverable, than the path of some obscure trading ship in some past generation through the Atlantic Ocean. Generally, it will be quite near enough to the truth if she places uponthe meridian of 1000 yearsb.c.the three Romances—Argonautic, Theban, Trojan; and she will then have the satisfaction of finding that, as at the opening of authentic history, she found the Roman, the Greek, and the Asiatic inaugural events coinciding in the same exact focus, so in these semi-fabulous or ante-Olympian events, she finds that one and the same effort of memory serves to registerthem, and also the most splendid of the Jewish eras—that of David and Solomon. The round sum of 1000 yearsb.c., so easily remembered, without distinction, without modification, 'sans phrase' (to quote a brutal regicide), serves alike for the Seven-gated Thebes,[39]for Troy, and for Jerusalem in its most palmy days.

V.A Perplexity Cleared Up.—Before passing onward here, it is highly important to notice a sort of episode in history, which fills up the interval between 777 and 555, but which is constantly confounded and perplexed with what took place before 777.

The wordAssyriais that by which the perplexity ismaintained. The Assyrian empire, as the pupil is told, was destroyed in the person of Sardanapalus. Yet, in her Bible, she reads of Sennacherib, King of Assyria. 'Was Sennacherib, then, before Sardanapalus?' she will ask; and her teacher will inform her that he was not.

Such things puzzle her. They seem palpable contradictions. But now let her understand that out of the Assyrian empire split off three separate kingdoms, of which one was called the Assyrian, not empire, but kingdom; there lurks the secret of the error. And to this kingdom of Assyria it was that Sennacherib belonged. Or, in order to represent by a sensible image this derivation of kingdoms from the stock of the old superannuated Assyrian empire (to which belonged Nimrod, Ninus, and Semiramis—those mighty phantoms, with their incredible armies); let her figure to herself some vast river, like the Nile or the Ganges, with the form assumed by its mouths. Often it will happen, where such a river is not hemmed in between rocks, or confined to the bed of a particular valley, that, perhaps, a hundred or two of miles before reaching the sea, upon coming into a soft, alluvial soil, it will force several different channels for itself. As these must make angles to each other, in order to form different roads, the land towards the disemboguing of the river will take the arrangement of a triangle. And as that happens to be the form of a Greek capital D (in the Greek alphabet called Delta), it has been usual to call such an arrangement of a great river's mouth a Delta.

Now, then, let her think of the Assyrian empire under the notion of the Nile, descending from far distant regions, and from fountains that were concealed forages, if even now discovered. Then, when it approaches the sea, and splits up its streams, so as to form a Delta, let her regard that Delta as the final state of the Assyrian power, the kingdom state lasting for about two centuries until swallowed up altogether, and remoulded into unity by the Persian empire.

The Delta, therefore, or the Nile dividing into three streams, will represent the three kingdoms formed out of the ruins of the Assyrian empire, when falling to pieces by the death of Sardanapalus. One of these three kingdoms is often called the Median; one the Chaldæan; and the third is called the Assyrian kingdom. But the most rememberable shape in which they can be recalled is, perhaps, by the names of their capitals. The capital cities were as follows: of the first,Ecbatana, which is the modernHamadan; of the second,Babylon, on the Euphrates, of which the ruins have been fully ascertained in our own times; at present, nothing remainsbutruins, and these ruins are dangerous to visit, both from human marauders prowling in that neighbourhood, and from wild beasts of the most formidable class, which are so little disturbed in their awful lairs, that they bask at noon-day amongst the huge hills of half-vitrified bricks. Finally, of the third kingdom, which still retained the name of Assyria, the metropolis wasNineveh, on the Tigris, revealed by Layard.

These three kingdoms had some internal wars and revolutions during the two centuries which elapsed from the great period 777 (the period of Sardanapalus), until the days of Cyrus, the Persian. By that time the three had become two, the kingdom of Nineveh had been swallowed up, and Cyrus, who was destined to formthe Persian empire upon their ruins, found one change less to be effected than might have been looked for. Of the two which remained, he conquered one, and the other came to him by maternal descent. Thus he gained all three, and moulded them into one, called Persia.

VI.Five and Five and Five.—The crowning action in which Cyrus figures is, therefore, that of conqueror of Babylon, and all the details of his career point forward, like markings on the dial, towards that great event, as full of interest for the imagination as any of the events of pre-Christian history. I would fain for once by the aid of metre, fix more firmly in the mind of the reader the grandeur and imposing significance of this event:

Thus in Five and Five and Five did Cyrus the Great of Elam,[40]On a festal night break in with roar of the fierce alalagmos.[41]Over Babylonian walls, over tower and turret of entrance,Over helmèd heads, and over the carnage of armies.Idle the spearsman's spear, Assyrian scymitar idle;Broken the bow-string lay of the Mesopotamian archer;'Ride to the halls of Belshazzar, ride through the murderous uproar;Ride to the halls of Belshazzar!' commanded Cyrus of Elam.They rode to the halls of Belshazzar. Oh, merciful, merciful angels!That prompt sweet tears to men, hang veils, hang drapery darkest,—If any may hide or may pall this night's tempestuous horror.Like a deluge the army poured in on their snorting Bactrian horses,Rattled the Parthian quivers, rang the Parthian harness of iron,High upon spears rode the torches, and from them in showery blazesRained splendour lurid and fierce on the dreamlike ruinous uproar,Such as delusions often from fever's fierce vertical ardourShow through the long-chambered halls and corridors endless,Blazing with cruel light—show to the brain of the stricken man;Such as the angel of dreams sometimes sends to the guilty.Such light lay in open front, but palpable ebony blackness,Sealed every far-off street in deep and awful abysses,Out of which rose like phantoms, rose and sank as a sea-birdRises and sinks on the waves of a dim, tumultuous ocean,Faces dabbled in blood, phantasmagory direful and scenic.* * * *But where is Belshazzar the Lord? Has he fled? Has he found an asylum?Or still does he pace in his palace, blind-seeming or moonstruck?Still does he tread proudly the palace, fancy-deluded,Prophets of falsehood trusting, or false Babylonian idols,Defying the odious truth from the summit of empire!Lo! at his palace gates the fierce Apollyon's great army,With maces uplifted, stand to make way for great Cyrus of Elam.Watching for signal from him whose truncheon this way or that bids:'Strike!' said Cyrus the King. 'Strike!' said the princes of Elam;And the brazen gates at the word, like flax that is broken asunderBy fire from earth or from heaven, snapped as a bulrush,Snapped as a reed, as a wand, as the tiny toy of an infant.Marvellous the sight that followed! Oh, most august revelation!Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open spaces enormous;Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle;Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation.Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments.Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas,Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effortOf chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet,Even then lightly proceeding with timbrel, dulcimer, hautboy,Gong and loud kettledrum and fierce-blown tempestuous organ.Banners floated in air, colossal embroidery tissuesOf Tyrian looms, scarlet, black, violet and amber,Or the perfectest cunning of trained Babylonian artist,Or massy embossed, from the volant shuttle of Phrygian.Banners suspended in shade, or in the full glare of the lamplight,Mid cressets and chandeliers by jewelly chains swinging pendant.* * * * *Draw a veil o'er the rout when advances great Cyrus of Elam,Dusky-browed archers behind him, and spearmen before,When he cries 'Strike!' and the gorgeously inlaid pavementsRun ruddy with blood of the festive Assyrians there.

* * * *

But where is Belshazzar the Lord? Has he fled? Has he found an asylum?Or still does he pace in his palace, blind-seeming or moonstruck?Still does he tread proudly the palace, fancy-deluded,Prophets of falsehood trusting, or false Babylonian idols,Defying the odious truth from the summit of empire!Lo! at his palace gates the fierce Apollyon's great army,With maces uplifted, stand to make way for great Cyrus of Elam.Watching for signal from him whose truncheon this way or that bids:'Strike!' said Cyrus the King. 'Strike!' said the princes of Elam;And the brazen gates at the word, like flax that is broken asunderBy fire from earth or from heaven, snapped as a bulrush,Snapped as a reed, as a wand, as the tiny toy of an infant.Marvellous the sight that followed! Oh, most august revelation!Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open spaces enormous;Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle;Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation.Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments.Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas,Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effortOf chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet,Even then lightly proceeding with timbrel, dulcimer, hautboy,Gong and loud kettledrum and fierce-blown tempestuous organ.Banners floated in air, colossal embroidery tissuesOf Tyrian looms, scarlet, black, violet and amber,Or the perfectest cunning of trained Babylonian artist,Or massy embossed, from the volant shuttle of Phrygian.Banners suspended in shade, or in the full glare of the lamplight,Mid cressets and chandeliers by jewelly chains swinging pendant.

* * * * *

Draw a veil o'er the rout when advances great Cyrus of Elam,Dusky-browed archers behind him, and spearmen before,When he cries 'Strike!' and the gorgeously inlaid pavementsRun ruddy with blood of the festive Assyrians there.

VII.—Greece and Rome.—My female readers, whom only I contemplate in every line of this little work, and who would have a right to consider it disrespectful if I were to leave a single word of Latin or Greek unexplained, must understand that the Greeks, according to that universal habit of viewing remote objects in a relation of ascent or descent with respect to the observer, whence the 'going up to Jerusalem,' and our own 'going up to London,' always figured a journey eastwards, that is, directed towards the Euphrates or Tigris, or to any part of Asia from Greece as tendingupwards. In this mode of conceiving their relations to the East, they were governed semi-consciously by the sense of a vast presence beyond the Tigris—glorified by grandeur and by distance—the golden city of Susa, and the throne of the great king. Accordingly, the expedition therefore of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes was called by Xenophon, when recording it, the Anabasis, or going up of Cyrus; and, from the accident of its celebrity, this title has adhered to that expedition; and to that book—as if either could claim it by some exclusive title; whereas, on the contrary, the Katabasis, or going down, furnishes by much the larger and the more interesting part of the work. And, in any case, the title is open to all Asiatic expeditions whatsoever; to the Trojan that just crossed the water, to the Macedonian that went beyond the Indus. The word Anàbăsis must have its accent on the syllableab, not on the penultimate syllableas.

In coming to the history of Imperial Rome, one is fortunately made sensible at once of a vast advantage, which is this—that one is not throwing away one's labour. Sad it is, after ploughing a stiff and difficult clay, to find all at once that the whole is a task of so little promise that perhaps, on the whole, one might as well have left it untouched.

X. Yes, I remember that my cousin, Cecilia Dinbury, took the pains to master—or perhaps one ought to say tomistress—the history.

L. No, tomissit, is what one ought to say.

X. Fie, my dear second cousin—Fie, fie, if you please. Tomissit, indeed! Ah, how we wished that wehadmissed it. But we had no such luck. There were we broiling through a hot, hot August, broiling away at this intolerable stew of Iskis and Fuskis, and all to no end or use. Granted that too often it is, or it may be so. But here we are safe. Who can fancy or feel so much as the shadow of a demur, when peregrinating Rome, that we might be losing our toil?

Now, then, in the highest spirits, let us open our studies. And first let us map out a chart of thepersonnelfor pretty nearly a century. Twelve Cæsars—the twelve first—should clearly of themselves make more than a century. For I am sure all of you, except our two new friends, know so much of arithmetic as that multiplication and division are a great menace upon addition and subtraction. It is, therefore, a thing most desirable to set up compound modes—short devices for abridging these. Now 10 is the earliest number written with two digits: and the higher the multiplier, so much harder, apparently, the process. Yet here at least a great simplification offers. To multiply by 10, all you haveto do is to put a cipher after the multiplicand. Twenty-seven soldiers are to have 10 guineas each, how much is required to pay all twenty-seven? Why, 27 into 10 is 27 with a cipher at the end—27 ∶ 0,i.e., 270.Ergo, twelve Cæsars, supposing each to reign ten years, would make, no,shouldmake, with anything like great lives—12 ∶ 0,i.e., 120 years. And when you consider that one of the twelve, viz., Augustus, singly, forhisshare, contributed fifty and odd years, if the other eleven had given ten each that would be 11 ∶ 0; this would make a total of about 170.

VIII.—Beginning of Modern Era.—From the period of Justinian commences a new era—an era of unusual transition. This is the broad principle of change. Old things are decaying, new things are forming and gathering. The lines of decay and of resurrection are moving visibly and palpably to every eye in counteracting agency for one result—life and a new truth for humanity. All the great armies of generous barbarians, showing, by contrast with Rome and Greece, the opulence of teeming nature as against the powers of form in utter superannuation, were now, therefore, no longer moving, roaming, seeking—they had taken up their ground; they were in a general process of castrametation, marking out their alignments and deploying into open order upon ground now permanently taken up for their settlement. The early trumpets, the morningréveilléof the great Christian nations—England, France, Spain, Lombardy—were sounding to quarters. Franks had knit into one the rudiments of a great kingdom upon the soil of France; the Saxons and Angles, with some Vandals, had, through a whole century, been defiling by vast trains into the great island which they were called byProvidence to occupy and to ennoble; the Vandals had seated themselves, though in this case only with no definite hopes, along the extreme region of the Barbary States. Vandals might and did survive for a considerable period in ineffective fragments, but not as a power. The Visigoths had quartered themselves on Spain, there soon to begin a conflict for the Cross, and to maintain it for eight hundred years, and finally to prevail. And lastly, the Lombards had thrown a network of colonization over Italy, which, as much by the cohesions which it shook loose and broke asunder as by the new one which it bred, exhibited a power like that of the coral insects, and gave promise of a new empire built out of floating dust and fragments.

The movements which formerly had resembled those gigantic pillars of sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts—suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach, manœuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse, fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other travellers—have passed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had crossed the vast barriers of Western Europe—the Alps, the Vosges, the Pyrenees, the ocean—these were now the wards within which they had committed their hopes and the graves of their fathers. Social developments tended to the same, and no longer either wishing or finding it possible to roam, they were all now, through an entire century, taking up their ground and making good their tumultuous irruptions; with the power of movinghad been conjoined a propensity to move. Rustic life, which must essentially have been maintained on the great area of German vagrancy, was more and more confirmed.

With this physical impossibility of roaming, and with the reciprocal compression of each exercised on the other, coincided the new instincts of civilization. They were no longer barbarous by a brutal and animal barbarism. The deep soil of their powerful natures had long been budding into nobler capacities, and had expanded into nobler perceptions. Reverence for female dignity, a sentiment never found before in any nation, gave a vernal promise of some higher humanity, on a wider scale than had yet been exhibited. Strong sympathies, magnetic affinities, prepared this great encampment of nations for Christianity. Their nobility needed such a field for its expansion; Christianity needed such a human nature for its evolution. The strong and deep nature of the Teutonic tribes could not have been evolved, completed, without Christianity. Christianity in a soil so shallow and unracy as the Græco-Latin, could not have struck those roots which are immovable. The ultimate conditions of the soil and the capacities of the culture must have corresponded. The motions of Barbaria had hitherto indicated only change; change without hope; confusion without tendencies; strife without principle of advance; new births in each successive age without principle of regeneration; momentary gain balanced by momentary loss; the tumult of a tossing ocean which tends to none but momentary rest. But now the currents are united, enclosed, and run in one direction, and that is definite and combined.

Now truly began that modern era, of which we happilyreap the harvest: then were laid the first foundations of social order and the first effective hint of that sense of mutual aid and dependence which has, century by century, been creating such a balance and harmony of adjusted operations—of agencies working night and day, which no man sees, for services which no man creates: the agencies are like Ezekiel's wheels—self-sustained; the services in which they labour have grown up imperceptibly as the growth of a yew, and from a period as far removed from cognizance. One man dies every hour out of myriads, his place is silently supplied, and the mysterious economy thus propagates itself in silence, like the motion of the planets, from age to age. Hands innumerable are every moment writing summonses, returns, reports, figures—records that would stretch out to the crack of doom, as yet every year accumulated, written by professional men, corrected by correctors, checked by controllers, and afterwards read by corresponding men, re-read by corresponding controllers, passed and ratified by corresponding ratifiers; and through this almighty pomp of wheels, whose very whirling would be heard into other planets, did not the very velocity of their motion seem to sleep on their soft axle, is the business of this great nation, judicial, fixed, penal, deliberative, statistical, commercial, all carried on without confusion, never distracting one man by its might, nor molesting one man by its noise.

Now, in the semi-fabulous times of Egypt and Assyria, things were not so managed. Ours are the ages of intellectual powers, of working by equivalents and substitutions; but theirs were done by efforts of brute power, possible only in the lowest condition of animal man, when all wills converged absolutely in one, and whenhuman life, cheap as dog's, had left man in no higher a state of requirement, and had given up human power to be applied at will—without art or skill.

Then the armies of a Semiramis even were in this canine state. It was her curse to have subjects that had no elevation, swarming by myriads like flies; mere animal life, the mere animal armies which she needed; what she wanted was exactly what they would yield. To such cattle all cares beyond that of mere provender were thrown away. Surgical care and the ambulance, such as the elevation of man's condition, and the solemnity of his rights, seen by the awful eye of Christianity, will always require, were simply ridiculous. As well raise hospitals for decayed butterflies. Provender was all: notpanem et circenses—bread and theatrical shows—but simply bread, and that wretched of its kind. Drink was an ideal luxury. Was there not the Euphrates, was there not the Tigris, the Aranes? The Roman armies carriedposcaby way of such luxury, a drink composed of vinegar and water. But as to Semiramis—what need of the vinegar? And why carry the water? Could it not be found in the Euphrates, etc.? Let the dogs lap at the Euphrates, and stay for their next draught till they come to the Tigris or the Aranes. Or, if they drank a river or so dry, and a million or two should die, what of that? Let them go on to the Tigris, and thence to the Aranes, the Oxus, or Indus. Clothes were dispensable from the climate, food only of the lowest quality, and finally the whole were summoned only for one campaign, and usually this was merely a sort of partisan camisade upon a colossal scale, in which the superfluous population of one vast nation threw themselves upon another. Mere momentum turnedthe scale; one nuisance of superfluous humanity was discharged upon such another nuisance, the one exterminating the other, or, if both by accident should be exterminated, what mattered it? The major part of the two nuisances, like algebraical quantities of plus and minus, extinguished each other. And, in any case, the result, whatever it might be, of that one campaign, which was rather a journey terminating in a bad battle of mobs, than anything artificial enough to deserve the title of camp, terminated the whole war. Here, at least, we see the determining impulse of political economy intervening, coming round upon them, if it had not been perceived before. If the two nations began their warfare, and planned it in defiance of all common laws and exchequers, at any rate the time it lasted was governed by that only. The same thing recurred in the policy of the feudal ages; the bumpkins, the vassals, were compelled to follow the standard, but their service was limited to a certain number of weeks. Afterwards, by law, as well as by custom, they dissolved for the autumnal labour of the harvest. And thus it was, until the princes would allow of mercenary armies, no system of connecting politics grew up in Europe, or could grow up; having no means of fighting each other, they were like leopards in Africa gnawing at a leopard in Asia; they fumed apart like planets that could not cross; a vast revolution, which Robertson ascribes to the reign of Francis I., but which I, upon far better grounds and on speculations much more exclusively pursued, date from the age of Louis XI. Differing in everything, and by infinite degrees for the worse from these early centuries, the age of Semiramis agreed in this—that if the non-culture of the human race allowed them to break out into war with little or no preparationbut what each man personally could make, and if thus far political economy did not greatly control the policy of nations, yet in the reaction these same violated laws vindicated their force by sad retributions. Famines, at all events dire exhaustion, invariably put an end to such tumultuary wars, if they did not much control their beginnings,[42]and periodically expressed their long retributory convulsions.

Not, therefore, because political economy was of little avail, but because the details are lost in the wilderness of years, must we disregard the political economy in the early Assyrian combinations of the human race. The details are lost for political economy as a cause, and the details are equally lost of the wars and the revolutions which were its effects. But in coming more within the light of authentic history, I contend that political economy is better known, and that in that proportion it explains much of what ought to be known. For example, I contend that the condition of Athens, for herself and for the rest of the Greek confederacy, nay, the entire course of the Athenian wars, of all that Athens did or forbore to do, her actions alike, and her omissions, are to be accounted for, and lie involved in the statistics of her fiscal condition.

IX.—Geography.—Look next at geography. The consideration of this alone throws a new light on history. Every country that is now or will be, has had some of its primary determinations impressed upon its policy and institutions; nay, upon its feeling and character, which is the well of its policy, by its geographical position: that is,by its position as respects climate in the first place, secondly, as respects neighbours (i.e., enemies), whether divided by mountains, rivers, deserts, or the great desert of the sea—or divided only by great belts of land—a passable solitude. Thirdly, as respects its own facilities and conveniences for raising food, clothing, luxuries. Indeed, not only is it so moulded and determined as to its character and aspects, but oftentimes even as to its very existence.

Many have noticed wisely and truly in the physical aspect of Asia and the South of Caucasus, that very destiny of slavery and of partition into great empires, which has always hung over them. The great plains of Asia fit it for the action of cavalry and vast armies—by which the fate of generations is decided in a day; and at the same time fit it for the support of those infinite myriads without object, which make human life cheap and degraded. That this was so is evident from what Xenophon tells.

On the other hand, many have seen in the conformation of Greece revolving round a nucleus able to protect in case of invasion, yet cut up into so many little chambers, of which each was sacred from the intrusion of the rest during the infancy of growth, the solution of all the marvels which Grecian history unfolds.

FOOTNOTES:[20]This distinction is of some consequence. Else the student would be puzzled at finding [which is really the truth] that, after the Twelve Cæsars and the five patriotic emperors who succeeded them, we know less of the Roman princes through centuries after the Christian era, than of the Roman Consuls through a space of three centuries preceding the Christian era. In fact, except for a few gossiping and merelypersonalanecdotes communicated by the Augustan History and a few other authorities, we really know little of the most illustrious amongst the Roman emperors of the West, beyond the fact (all but invariable) that they perished by assassination. But still this darkness is not of the same nature, nor owing to the same causes, as the Grecian darkness prior to the Olympiads.[21]Except, indeed, by the barbarous contrivance of cutting away some letters from a name, and then filling up their place with other letters which, by previous agreement, have been rendered significant of arithmetic numbers. This is the idea on which theMemoria Technicaof Dr. Grey proceeds. More appropriately it might have been namedMemoria Barbarica, for the dreadful violence done to the most beautiful, rhythmical, and melodious names would, at any rate, have remained as a repulsive expression of barbarism to all musical ears, had the practical benefits of this machinery been all that they profess to be. Meantime these benefits are really none at all. They offer us a mere mockery, defeating with one hand what they accomplish with the other.[22]It is all but an impossible problem for a nation in the situation of Greece to send down a record to a posterity distant by five centuries, to overlap the gulf of years between the point of starting—the absolute now of commencement and the remote generation at which you take aim. Trust to tradition, not to the counsel of one man. But tradition is buoyant.[23]Crusade.—There seems a contradiction in the very terms of Pagan—that is, non-Christian, and Crusade—that is, warfare symbolically Christian. But, by a license not greater than is often practised in corresponding circumstances, the word Crusade may be used to express any martial expedition amongst a large body of confederate nations having or representing an imaginative (not imaginary) interest or purpose with no direct profession of separate or mercenary object for each nation apart.[24]The truths of Scripture are of too vast a compass, too much like the Author of those truths—illimitable and incapable of verbal circumscription, and, besides, are too much diffused through many collateral truths, too deeply echoed and reverberated by trains of correspondences and affinities laid deep in nature, and above all, too affectingly transcribed in the human heart, ever to come within the compass or material influence of a few words this way or that; any more than all eternity can be really and locally confined within a little golden ring which is assumed for its symbol. The same thing, I repeat, may be said of chronology and its accidents. The chronologies of Scripture, its prophetic weeks of Daniel, and its mysterious æons of the Apocalypse, are too awful in their realities, too vast in their sweep and range of application, to be controlled or affected by the very utmost errors that could arise from lapse of time or transcription unrevised. And the more so, because errors that by the supposition are errors of accident, cannot all point in one direction: one would be likely in many cases to compensate another. But, finally, I would make this frank acknowledgment to a young pupil without fear that it could affect her reverence for Scripture. It is of the very grandeur of Scripture that she can afford to be negligent of her chronology. Suppose this case: suppose the Scriptures protected by no special care or providence; suppose no security, no barrier to further errors, to have arisen from the discovery of printing—suppose the Scriptures to be in consequence transcribed for thousands of years—even in that case the final result would be this: it would be (and in part perhaps it really is) true or not true as to its minor or petty chronology—not true, as having been altered insensibly like any human composition where the internal sense was not of a nature to maintain its integrity. True, even as to trifles, in that sense which the majestic simplicity and self-conformity of truth in a tale originally true would guarantee, it might yet be, because of the grandeur of the main aim, and the sense of deeper relations and the perception of verisimilitude.[25]'A New Slave Country'—and this for more reasons than one. Slaves were growing dearer in Rome; secondly, a practice had been for some time increasing amongst the richest of the noble families in Rome, of growing household bodies of gladiators, by whose aid they fought the civic battles of ambition; and thirdly, as to Cæsar in particular, he had raised and equipped a whole legion out of his own private funds, and, of course, for his own private service; so that he probably looked to Britain as a new quarry from which he might obtain the human materials of his future armies, and also as an arena or pocket theatre, in which he could organize and discipline these armies secure from jealous observation.[26]Here the pupil will naturally object—was not Judæa an Asiatic land? And did not Judæa act upon Europe? Doubtless; and in the sublimest way by which it is possible for man to act upon man; not only through the highest and noblest part of man's nature, but (as most truly it may be affirmed) literally creating, in a practical sense, that nature. For, to say nothing of the sublime idea of Redemption as mystically involved in the types and prophecies of Jewish prophets, and in the very ceremonies of the Jewish religion, what was the very highest ideal of God which man—philosophic man even—had attained, compared with that of the very meanest Jew? It is false to say that amongst the philosophers of Greece or Rome the Polytheistic creed was rejected. No Pagan philosopher ever adopted, ever even conceived, the sublime of the Jewish God—as a being not merely of essential unity, but as deriving from that unity the moral relations of a governor and a retributive judge towards human creatures. So that Judæa bore an office for the human race of a most awful and mysterious sanctity. But (and partly for that reason) the civil and social relations of Judæa to the human race were less than nothing. And thence arose the intolerant scorn of such writers as Tacitus for the Christians, whom, of course, they viewed as Jews, and nothingbutJews. Thus far they were right—that, as a nation, valued upon the only scale known to politicians, the Jews brought nothing at all to the common fund of knowledge or civilization. One element of knowledge, however, the Jews did bring, though at that time unknown, and long after, for want of historic criticism in the history of chronologic researches, viz., a chronology far superior to that of the Septuagint, as will be shown farther on, and far superior to the main guides of Paganism. But the reason why this superiority of chronology will, after all, but little avail the general student is, that it relates merely to the Assyrian or Persian princes in their intercourse with the courts of Jerusalem or of Samaria.[27]Juba, King of Mauritania, during the struggle of Cæsar and Pompey.[28]Which clannish feeling, be it observed, always depends for its life and intensity upon the comparison with others; as they are despised, in that ratio rises the clannish self-estimation. Whereas the nobler pride of a Roman patriotism is αυταρκης and independent of external relations. Nothing is more essentially opposed, though often confounded under the common name of patriotism, than the love of country in a Roman or English sense, and the spirit of clannish jealousy.[29]This it was (a circumstance overlooked by many who have written on the Roman literature), this destiny announced and protected by early auguries, which made the idea of Rome a great and imaginative idea. The patriotism of the Grecian was, as indicated in an earlier note, a mean, clannish feeling, always courting support to itself, and needing support from imaginary 'barbarism' in its enemies, and raising itself into greatness by means oftheirlittleness. But with the nobler Roman patriotism was a very different thing. The august destiny of his own eternal city [observe—'eternal,' not in virtue of history, but of prophecy, not upon the retrospect and the analogies of any possible experience, but by the necessity of an aboriginal doom], a city that was to be the centre of an empire whose circumference is everywhere, did not depend for any part of its majesty upon the meanness of its enemies; on the contrary, in the very grandeur of those enemies lay, by a rebound of the feelings inevitable to a Roman mind, the paramount grandeur of that awful Republic which had swallowed them all up.[30]I do not mean to deny the casual intercourse between Rome and particular cities of Greece, which sometimes flash upon us for a moment in the earliest parts of the Roman annals: what I am insisting upon, is the absence of all national or effectual intercourse.[31]Even an attorney, however [according to an old story, which I much fear is a Joe Miller, but which ought to be fact], is not so rigorous as to allow of no latitude, for, having occasion to send a challenge with the stipulation of fighting at twelve paces, upon 'engrossing' this challenge the attorney directed his clerk to add—'Twelve paces, be the same more or less.' And so I say of the Olympiad—'777 years, be the same more or less.'[32]And finally, were it necessary to add one word by way of reconciling the student to the substitution of 777 for 776, it might be sufficient to remind him that, even in the rigour of the minutest calculus, when the 776 years are fully accomplished—to prove which accomplishment we must suppose some little time over and above the 776 to have elapsed—then this surplus, were it but a single hour, throws us at once into the 777th year. This was, in fact, the oversight which misled a class of disputants, whom I hope the reader is too young to remember, but whom I, alas! remember too well in the year 1800. They imagined and argued that the eighteenth century closed upon the first day of the year 1800. New Year's Day of the year 1799, they understood as the birthday of the Christian Church, proclaiming it to be then 1799 years old, not as commencing its 1799th year. And so on. Pye, the Poet Laureate of that day, in an elaborate preface to a secular ode, argued the point very keenly. It is certain (though not evident at first sight) that in the year 1839 the Christian period of time is not, as children say, 'going of' 1840, but going of 1839: whereas the other party contend that it is in its 1840th year, tending in short to become that which it will actually be on its birthday,i.e., on the calends of January, orle Jour de l'an, or New Year's Day of 1840.[33]See note immediately preceding on previous page.[34]'With impunity.'—There is no one point in which I have found a more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers, English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of education, than this great maxim—that the memory ought never to be exercised in a state of insulation, that is, in those blank efforts of its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory, when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude. Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text—to this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts that had been previously brought under logical laws.[35]'The long careering of an earthquake.'—It is remarkable, and was much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to its grandfinale, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It passed through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged through a great part of Leicestershire; and its rate of travelling was not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849 or 1850.—Ed.][36]'The exact personality.'—The historical personality, or complete identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circumstances that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable. Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus; others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.[37]'And Asiatic.'—Asiatic, let the pupil observe, and not merely Assyrian; for the Assyria of this era represents all that was afterwards Media, Persia, Chaldæa, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact limits of the Assyrian empire, which are as indistinct in space as in time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this empire.[38]And this is so exceedingly striking, that I am much surprised at the learned disputants upon the era of Homer having failed to notice this argument; especially when we see how pitiably poor they are in probabilities or presumptions of any kind. The miserable shred of an argument with those who wish to carry up Homer as high as any colourable pretext will warrant, is this, that he must have lived pretty near to the war which he celebrates, inasmuch as he never once alludes to a great revolutionary event in the Peloponnesus. Consequently, it is argued, Homer did not live to witness that revolution. Yet he must have witnessed it, if he had lived at the distance of eighty years from the capture of Troy; for such was the era of that event, viz., the return of the Heraclidæ. Now, in answer to this, it is obvious to say that negations prove little. Homer has failed to notice, has omitted to notice, or found no occasion for noticing, scores of great facts contemporary with Troy, or contemporary with himself, which yet must have existed for all that. In particular, he has left us quite in the dark about the great empires, and the great capitals on the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Nile; and yet it was of some importance to have noticed the relation in which the kingdom of Priam stood to the great potentates on those rivers. The argument, therefore, drawn from the non-notice of the Heraclidæ, is but trivial. On the other hand, an argument of some strength for a lower era as the true era of Homer, may be drawn from the much slighter colouring of the marvellous, which in Homer's treatment of the story attaches to theIliad, than to theSeven against Thebes. In the Iliad we have the mythologic marvellous sometimes; the marvellous of necessity surrounding the gods and their intercourse with men; but we have no Amphiaraus swallowed up by the earth, no Œdipus descending into a mysterious gulf at the summons of an unseen power. And beyond all doubt the shield of Achilles, supposing it no interpolation of a later age, argues a much more advanced state of the arts of design, etc., than the shields, (described by Æschylus, as we may suppose, from ancient traditions preserved in the several families), of the seven chiefs who invaded Thebes.[39]'Seven-gated,' both as an expression which recalls the subject of the Romance (the Seven Anti-Theban Chieftains), and as one which distinguishes this Grecian Thebes from the Egyptian Thebes; that being calledHekatómpylos, orHundred-gated. Of course some little correction will always be silently applied to the general expression, so as to meet the difference between the two generations that served at Troy and in the Argonautic expedition, and again between David and his son. If the elder generation be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000minus30 will express the era of the younger; if the younger be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000plus30 will express the era of the elder. Or, better still, 1000 may be taken as the half-way era in which both generations met; that era in which the father was yet living and active, whilst the son was already entering upon manhood; that era, for instance, at which David was still reigning, though his son Solomon had been crowned. On this plan, no correction at all will be required; 15 years on each side of the 1000 will mark the two terms within which the events and persons range; and the 1000 will be the central point of the period.[40]Elam is the Scriptural name for Persia.[41]'Alala! Alala!' the war cry of Eastern armies.[42]And for the very reason that political economy had but a small share in determining the war of the year A, it became not so much a great force as the sole force for putting an end to the war of the year D.

[20]This distinction is of some consequence. Else the student would be puzzled at finding [which is really the truth] that, after the Twelve Cæsars and the five patriotic emperors who succeeded them, we know less of the Roman princes through centuries after the Christian era, than of the Roman Consuls through a space of three centuries preceding the Christian era. In fact, except for a few gossiping and merelypersonalanecdotes communicated by the Augustan History and a few other authorities, we really know little of the most illustrious amongst the Roman emperors of the West, beyond the fact (all but invariable) that they perished by assassination. But still this darkness is not of the same nature, nor owing to the same causes, as the Grecian darkness prior to the Olympiads.

[21]Except, indeed, by the barbarous contrivance of cutting away some letters from a name, and then filling up their place with other letters which, by previous agreement, have been rendered significant of arithmetic numbers. This is the idea on which theMemoria Technicaof Dr. Grey proceeds. More appropriately it might have been namedMemoria Barbarica, for the dreadful violence done to the most beautiful, rhythmical, and melodious names would, at any rate, have remained as a repulsive expression of barbarism to all musical ears, had the practical benefits of this machinery been all that they profess to be. Meantime these benefits are really none at all. They offer us a mere mockery, defeating with one hand what they accomplish with the other.

[22]It is all but an impossible problem for a nation in the situation of Greece to send down a record to a posterity distant by five centuries, to overlap the gulf of years between the point of starting—the absolute now of commencement and the remote generation at which you take aim. Trust to tradition, not to the counsel of one man. But tradition is buoyant.

[23]Crusade.—There seems a contradiction in the very terms of Pagan—that is, non-Christian, and Crusade—that is, warfare symbolically Christian. But, by a license not greater than is often practised in corresponding circumstances, the word Crusade may be used to express any martial expedition amongst a large body of confederate nations having or representing an imaginative (not imaginary) interest or purpose with no direct profession of separate or mercenary object for each nation apart.

[24]The truths of Scripture are of too vast a compass, too much like the Author of those truths—illimitable and incapable of verbal circumscription, and, besides, are too much diffused through many collateral truths, too deeply echoed and reverberated by trains of correspondences and affinities laid deep in nature, and above all, too affectingly transcribed in the human heart, ever to come within the compass or material influence of a few words this way or that; any more than all eternity can be really and locally confined within a little golden ring which is assumed for its symbol. The same thing, I repeat, may be said of chronology and its accidents. The chronologies of Scripture, its prophetic weeks of Daniel, and its mysterious æons of the Apocalypse, are too awful in their realities, too vast in their sweep and range of application, to be controlled or affected by the very utmost errors that could arise from lapse of time or transcription unrevised. And the more so, because errors that by the supposition are errors of accident, cannot all point in one direction: one would be likely in many cases to compensate another. But, finally, I would make this frank acknowledgment to a young pupil without fear that it could affect her reverence for Scripture. It is of the very grandeur of Scripture that she can afford to be negligent of her chronology. Suppose this case: suppose the Scriptures protected by no special care or providence; suppose no security, no barrier to further errors, to have arisen from the discovery of printing—suppose the Scriptures to be in consequence transcribed for thousands of years—even in that case the final result would be this: it would be (and in part perhaps it really is) true or not true as to its minor or petty chronology—not true, as having been altered insensibly like any human composition where the internal sense was not of a nature to maintain its integrity. True, even as to trifles, in that sense which the majestic simplicity and self-conformity of truth in a tale originally true would guarantee, it might yet be, because of the grandeur of the main aim, and the sense of deeper relations and the perception of verisimilitude.

[25]'A New Slave Country'—and this for more reasons than one. Slaves were growing dearer in Rome; secondly, a practice had been for some time increasing amongst the richest of the noble families in Rome, of growing household bodies of gladiators, by whose aid they fought the civic battles of ambition; and thirdly, as to Cæsar in particular, he had raised and equipped a whole legion out of his own private funds, and, of course, for his own private service; so that he probably looked to Britain as a new quarry from which he might obtain the human materials of his future armies, and also as an arena or pocket theatre, in which he could organize and discipline these armies secure from jealous observation.

[26]Here the pupil will naturally object—was not Judæa an Asiatic land? And did not Judæa act upon Europe? Doubtless; and in the sublimest way by which it is possible for man to act upon man; not only through the highest and noblest part of man's nature, but (as most truly it may be affirmed) literally creating, in a practical sense, that nature. For, to say nothing of the sublime idea of Redemption as mystically involved in the types and prophecies of Jewish prophets, and in the very ceremonies of the Jewish religion, what was the very highest ideal of God which man—philosophic man even—had attained, compared with that of the very meanest Jew? It is false to say that amongst the philosophers of Greece or Rome the Polytheistic creed was rejected. No Pagan philosopher ever adopted, ever even conceived, the sublime of the Jewish God—as a being not merely of essential unity, but as deriving from that unity the moral relations of a governor and a retributive judge towards human creatures. So that Judæa bore an office for the human race of a most awful and mysterious sanctity. But (and partly for that reason) the civil and social relations of Judæa to the human race were less than nothing. And thence arose the intolerant scorn of such writers as Tacitus for the Christians, whom, of course, they viewed as Jews, and nothingbutJews. Thus far they were right—that, as a nation, valued upon the only scale known to politicians, the Jews brought nothing at all to the common fund of knowledge or civilization. One element of knowledge, however, the Jews did bring, though at that time unknown, and long after, for want of historic criticism in the history of chronologic researches, viz., a chronology far superior to that of the Septuagint, as will be shown farther on, and far superior to the main guides of Paganism. But the reason why this superiority of chronology will, after all, but little avail the general student is, that it relates merely to the Assyrian or Persian princes in their intercourse with the courts of Jerusalem or of Samaria.

[27]Juba, King of Mauritania, during the struggle of Cæsar and Pompey.

[28]Which clannish feeling, be it observed, always depends for its life and intensity upon the comparison with others; as they are despised, in that ratio rises the clannish self-estimation. Whereas the nobler pride of a Roman patriotism is αυταρκης and independent of external relations. Nothing is more essentially opposed, though often confounded under the common name of patriotism, than the love of country in a Roman or English sense, and the spirit of clannish jealousy.

[29]This it was (a circumstance overlooked by many who have written on the Roman literature), this destiny announced and protected by early auguries, which made the idea of Rome a great and imaginative idea. The patriotism of the Grecian was, as indicated in an earlier note, a mean, clannish feeling, always courting support to itself, and needing support from imaginary 'barbarism' in its enemies, and raising itself into greatness by means oftheirlittleness. But with the nobler Roman patriotism was a very different thing. The august destiny of his own eternal city [observe—'eternal,' not in virtue of history, but of prophecy, not upon the retrospect and the analogies of any possible experience, but by the necessity of an aboriginal doom], a city that was to be the centre of an empire whose circumference is everywhere, did not depend for any part of its majesty upon the meanness of its enemies; on the contrary, in the very grandeur of those enemies lay, by a rebound of the feelings inevitable to a Roman mind, the paramount grandeur of that awful Republic which had swallowed them all up.

[30]I do not mean to deny the casual intercourse between Rome and particular cities of Greece, which sometimes flash upon us for a moment in the earliest parts of the Roman annals: what I am insisting upon, is the absence of all national or effectual intercourse.

[31]Even an attorney, however [according to an old story, which I much fear is a Joe Miller, but which ought to be fact], is not so rigorous as to allow of no latitude, for, having occasion to send a challenge with the stipulation of fighting at twelve paces, upon 'engrossing' this challenge the attorney directed his clerk to add—'Twelve paces, be the same more or less.' And so I say of the Olympiad—'777 years, be the same more or less.'

[32]And finally, were it necessary to add one word by way of reconciling the student to the substitution of 777 for 776, it might be sufficient to remind him that, even in the rigour of the minutest calculus, when the 776 years are fully accomplished—to prove which accomplishment we must suppose some little time over and above the 776 to have elapsed—then this surplus, were it but a single hour, throws us at once into the 777th year. This was, in fact, the oversight which misled a class of disputants, whom I hope the reader is too young to remember, but whom I, alas! remember too well in the year 1800. They imagined and argued that the eighteenth century closed upon the first day of the year 1800. New Year's Day of the year 1799, they understood as the birthday of the Christian Church, proclaiming it to be then 1799 years old, not as commencing its 1799th year. And so on. Pye, the Poet Laureate of that day, in an elaborate preface to a secular ode, argued the point very keenly. It is certain (though not evident at first sight) that in the year 1839 the Christian period of time is not, as children say, 'going of' 1840, but going of 1839: whereas the other party contend that it is in its 1840th year, tending in short to become that which it will actually be on its birthday,i.e., on the calends of January, orle Jour de l'an, or New Year's Day of 1840.

[33]See note immediately preceding on previous page.

[34]'With impunity.'—There is no one point in which I have found a more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers, English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of education, than this great maxim—that the memory ought never to be exercised in a state of insulation, that is, in those blank efforts of its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory, when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude. Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my unassisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text—to this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts that had been previously brought under logical laws.

[35]'The long careering of an earthquake.'—It is remarkable, and was much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to its grandfinale, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It passed through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged through a great part of Leicestershire; and its rate of travelling was not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849 or 1850.—Ed.]

[36]'The exact personality.'—The historical personality, or complete identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circumstances that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable. Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus; others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.

[37]'And Asiatic.'—Asiatic, let the pupil observe, and not merely Assyrian; for the Assyria of this era represents all that was afterwards Media, Persia, Chaldæa, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact limits of the Assyrian empire, which are as indistinct in space as in time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this empire.

[38]And this is so exceedingly striking, that I am much surprised at the learned disputants upon the era of Homer having failed to notice this argument; especially when we see how pitiably poor they are in probabilities or presumptions of any kind. The miserable shred of an argument with those who wish to carry up Homer as high as any colourable pretext will warrant, is this, that he must have lived pretty near to the war which he celebrates, inasmuch as he never once alludes to a great revolutionary event in the Peloponnesus. Consequently, it is argued, Homer did not live to witness that revolution. Yet he must have witnessed it, if he had lived at the distance of eighty years from the capture of Troy; for such was the era of that event, viz., the return of the Heraclidæ. Now, in answer to this, it is obvious to say that negations prove little. Homer has failed to notice, has omitted to notice, or found no occasion for noticing, scores of great facts contemporary with Troy, or contemporary with himself, which yet must have existed for all that. In particular, he has left us quite in the dark about the great empires, and the great capitals on the Euphrates and the Tigris, and the Nile; and yet it was of some importance to have noticed the relation in which the kingdom of Priam stood to the great potentates on those rivers. The argument, therefore, drawn from the non-notice of the Heraclidæ, is but trivial. On the other hand, an argument of some strength for a lower era as the true era of Homer, may be drawn from the much slighter colouring of the marvellous, which in Homer's treatment of the story attaches to theIliad, than to theSeven against Thebes. In the Iliad we have the mythologic marvellous sometimes; the marvellous of necessity surrounding the gods and their intercourse with men; but we have no Amphiaraus swallowed up by the earth, no Œdipus descending into a mysterious gulf at the summons of an unseen power. And beyond all doubt the shield of Achilles, supposing it no interpolation of a later age, argues a much more advanced state of the arts of design, etc., than the shields, (described by Æschylus, as we may suppose, from ancient traditions preserved in the several families), of the seven chiefs who invaded Thebes.

[39]'Seven-gated,' both as an expression which recalls the subject of the Romance (the Seven Anti-Theban Chieftains), and as one which distinguishes this Grecian Thebes from the Egyptian Thebes; that being calledHekatómpylos, orHundred-gated. Of course some little correction will always be silently applied to the general expression, so as to meet the difference between the two generations that served at Troy and in the Argonautic expedition, and again between David and his son. If the elder generation be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000minus30 will express the era of the younger; if the younger be fixed to the year 1000, then 1000plus30 will express the era of the elder. Or, better still, 1000 may be taken as the half-way era in which both generations met; that era in which the father was yet living and active, whilst the son was already entering upon manhood; that era, for instance, at which David was still reigning, though his son Solomon had been crowned. On this plan, no correction at all will be required; 15 years on each side of the 1000 will mark the two terms within which the events and persons range; and the 1000 will be the central point of the period.

[40]Elam is the Scriptural name for Persia.

[41]'Alala! Alala!' the war cry of Eastern armies.

[42]And for the very reason that political economy had but a small share in determining the war of the year A, it became not so much a great force as the sole force for putting an end to the war of the year D.

Some time back I published in this journal a little paper on the Californian madness—for madness I presumed it to be, and upon two grounds. First, in so far as men were tempted into a lottery under the belief that it wasnota lottery; or, if it reallyweresuch, that it was a lottery without blanks. Secondly, in so far as men were tempted into a transitory speculation under the delusion that it was not transitory, but rested on some principle of permanence. We have since seen the Californian case repeated, upon a scale even of exaggerated violence, in Australia. There also, if great prizes seemed to be won in a short time, it was rashly presumed that something like an equitable distribution of these prizes took place. Supposing ten persons to have obtained £300 in a fortnight, people failed to observe that, if divided amongst the entire party of which these ten persons formed a section, the £300 would barely have yielded average wages. In one instance a very broad illustration of this occurred in the early experience of Victoria. A band of seven thousand people had worked together; whether simply in the sense of working as neighbours in the same local district, or in the commercial sense of working as partners, I do not know, noris it material to know. The result sounded enormous, when stated in a fragmentary way with reference to particular days, and possibly in reference also to particular persons, distinguished for luck, but on taking the trouble to sum up the whole amount of labourers, of days, and of golden ounces extracted, it did not appear that the wages to each individual could have averaged quite so much as twenty shillings a week, supposing the total product to have been on that principle of participation. Very possibly it wasnot; and in that case the gains of some individuals may have been enormous. But a prudent man, if he quits a certainty or migrates from a distance, will compute his prospects upon this scale of averages, and assuredly not upon the accidents of exceptional luck. The instant objection will be, that such luck isnotexceptional, but represents the ordinary case. Let us consider. The reports are probably much exaggerated; and something of the same machinery for systematic exaggeration is already forming itself as operated so beneficially for California. As yet, however, it is not absolutely certain that the reports themselves, taken literally, would exactly countenance the romantic impressions drawn from those reports by the public.

Until the reader has checked the accounts, or, indeed, has been enabled to check them, by balancing the amount of gain against the amount of labour applied, he cannot know but that the reports themselves would show on examination a series of unusual successes set against a series of entire failures, so as to leave afacit, after all corrections and allowances, of moderately good wages upon an equal distribution of the whole. I would remind him to propose this question: has it been asserted, even by these wild reports, with respect to any thousand men(taken as an aggregate), I do not mean to say that all have succeeded, or even that a majority have not failed decisively—that is more than I demand—but has it been asserted that they have realized so much in any week or any month as would, if divided equally amongst losers and winners, have allowed to each man anything conspicuously above the rate of ordinary wages? Of lotteries in general it has been often remarked, that if you buy a single ticket you have but a poor chance of winning, if you buy twenty tickets your chance is very much worse, and if you buy all the tickets your chance is none at all, but is exchanged for a certainty of loss. So as to the gold lottery of Australia, I suspect (and, observe, not assuming the current reports to be false, but, on the contrary, to be strictly correct for each separate case, only needing to be combined and collated as a whole) that if each separate century[43]of men emigrating to the goldfield of Mount Alexander were to make a faithful return of their aggregate winnings, that return would not prove seductive at all to our people at home, supposing these winnings to be distributed equally as amongst an incorporation of adventurers; though ithasproved seductive in the case of the extraordinary success being kept apart so as to fix and fascinate the gaze into an oblivion of the counterbalancing failures.

There is, however, notoriously, a natural propensity amongst men to confide in their luck; and, as this is a wholesome propensity in the main, it may seem too harsh to describe by the name ofmaniaeven a morbid excess of it, though it ought to strike the most sanguine man, that in order to account for the possibility of any failures at all, we must suppose the main harvest of favourable chances to decay with the first month or so of occupation by any commensurate body of settlers; so that in proportion to the strength and reality of the promises to the earliest settlers, will have been the rapid exhaustion of such promises. Exactlybecausethe district was really a choice one for those who came first, it must often be ruined forhimwho succeeds him.

Here, then, is a world of disappointments prepared and preparing for future emigrants. The favourite sports and chief lands of promise will by the very excess of their attractiveness have converged upon themselves the great strength of the reapers; and in very many cases the main harvest will have been housed before the new race of adventurers from Great Britain can have reached the ground. In most cases, therefore, ruin would be the instant solution of the disappointment. But in a country so teeming with promise as Australia, ruin is hardly a possible event. A hope lost is but a hope transfigured. And one is reminded of a short colloquy that took place on the field of Marengo. 'Is this battle lost?' demanded Napoleon of Desaix. 'It is,' replied Desaix; 'but, before the sun sets, there is plenty of time to win it back.' In like manner the new comers, on reaching the appointed grounds, will often have cause to say, 'Are we ruined this morning?' To which the answer will not unfrequently be, 'Yes; butthis is the best place for being ruined that has yet been discovered. You have trusted to the guidance of awill-of-the-wisp; but awill-of-the-wisphas been known to lead a man by accident to a better path than that which he had lost.' There is no use, therefore, in wasting our pity upon those who may happen to suffer by the first of the two delusions which I noticed, viz., the conceit that either Australia or California offers a lottery without blanks. Blanks too probably they will draw; but what matters it, when this disappointment cannot reach them until they find themselves amidst a wilderness of supplementary hopes? One prize has been lost, but twenty others have been laid open that had never been anticipated.

Far different, on the other hand, is the second delusion—the delusion of those who mistake a transitional for a permanent prosperity, and many of whom go so far in their frenzy as to see only matter of congratulation in the very extremity of changes, which (if realized) would carry desperate ruin into our social economy. For these people there is no indemnification. I begin with this proposition—that no material extension can be given to the use of gold after great national wants are provided for, without an enormous lowering of its price: which lowering, if once effected, and exactly in proportion as it is effected, takes away from the gold-diggers all motive for producing it. The dilemma is this, and seems to me inevitable: Given a certain depreciation of gold, as, for instance, by 80 per cent., then the profits of the miners falling in that same proportion[44](viz., by four-fifths) willleave no temptation whatever to pursue the trade of digging. But, on the other hand, such a depreciationnotbeing given—gold being supposed to range at anything approaching to its old price—in that case no considerable extension as to the uses of gold is possible. In either case alike the motive for producing gold rapidly decays. To keep up any steady encouragement to the miners, the market for gold must be prodigiously extended. That the market may be extended, new applications of gold must be devised: the old applications would not absorb more than a very limited increase. That new applications may be devised, a prodigious lowering of the price is required. But precisely as that result is approached theextraencouragement to the miners vanishes.Thatdrooping, the production will droop, even if nature should continue the extra supplies; and the old state of prices must restore itself.

The whole turns upon the possibility of extending the market for gold. A child must see that, if the demand for gold cannot be materially increased, it is altogethernugatory that nature should indefinitely enlarge the supply. In articles that adapt themselves to a variable scale of uses, so as to be capable of substitution for others, according to the relations of price, it is often possible enough that, in the event of any change which may lower their price, the increased demand may go on without assignable limits. For instance, when iron rises immoderately in price, timber is substituted to an indefinite extent. But, on the other hand, where the application is severely circumscribed, no fall of price will avail to extend the demand. Certain herbs, for instance, or minerals, employed for medicinal purposes, and for those only, have their supply regulated by the demand of hospitals and of private medical practitioners. That demand being once exhausted, no cheapness whatever will extend the market. Suppose the European market for leeches to be saturated; every man, suppose, is supplied; in that case, even anextrathousand cannot be sold. The purpose which leeches answer has been met. And afterthatnobody will take them as a gift. But in the case of gold, it is imagined that, although the market is pretty stationary whilst the price is stationary, let that price materially lower itself, and immediately the substitutions of gold for other metals, or for other decorative materials (as ivory, etc.), would begin to extend; and commensurately with such extensions the regular gold market would widen. This is the prevailing conceit. Now let us consider it.

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